


Fifteen Seconds

by castleinthesky (choirboyharem)



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Drunk Sex, Extremely Dubious Consent, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:34:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26872258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choirboyharem/pseuds/castleinthesky
Summary: In the most totally abstract way, Patrick remembered watchingHellraisersome fifteen years ago, placid and sleepy and lounging on top of Joe and watching Frank Cotton’s body get torn apart with fishhooks. Patrick thought he could probably use the same sort of treatment. All he needed was a cursed puzzle box.Pete would probably know where to get one, provided that he didn’t have one already.
Relationships: Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz
Kudos: 10





	Fifteen Seconds

**Author's Note:**

> i don’t know what this fic is supposed to be. it was supposed to be one thing and it turned into two and then three other things. huge tw for this being generally fucking disgusting and drippy (as most of my fics are). i obviously don't condone any of what's being portrayed. don't read any further if this content is upsetting to you.
> 
> this is set shortly after the end of monumentour and some time before any of the singles for ab/ap dropped, so the late spring/early summer of 2014. also, no wives/girlfriends au.

_ one two three four five six seven eight ow nine ten eleven ow fuck eleven twelve ow thirteen fourteen fucking christ fifteen _

The water was too hot. His hands glared neon pink, twitching and pulsing just underneath his skin. It crawled through him and sunk down into his bones like he was twelve and he had growing pains that wouldn’t end up amounting to anything. 

His skin was raw. His body was raw. Clinging to the sides of the sink, fingers clenching so they wouldn’t slip, Patrick watched the drain suck down the rotten flesh he’d had moments ago. 

He felt like it was growing back. He wanted to sink his fingernails into it and rip it off. In the most totally abstract way, he remembered watching  _ Hellraiser _ some fifteen years ago, placid and sleepy and lounging on top of Joe and watching Frank Cotton’s body get torn apart with fishhooks. Patrick thought he could probably use the same sort of treatment. All he needed was a cursed puzzle box. 

Pete would probably know where to get one, provided that he didn’t have one already. 

_ Pete.  _ Patrick swallowed and stared at the drain until the silver blurred. But not just him, fucking everybody. Not just Joe. Not just Andy. Fucking everybody was capable of finding out and capable of knowing. Capable of telling. Capable of leaking anything to anyone anywhere and making him into an object meant to be dissected by people who pretended to care. And that was what he needed, you know, a sex scandal to really tie the big red ribbon on the comeback of his career. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust anyone, but somebody was bound to offer him help. And it was bound to be behind his back. 

He didn’t need help. He didn’t need anything. He needed to scrub the skin off his fucking hands and forget about it. Patrick had had less-than-desirable sexual encounters before and he’d shaken them off every time throughout the years, as one did. This really wasn’t that different. 

It seriously wasn’t any different. Patrick looked up at himself in the bathroom mirror, getting lost in the split of his face from the crack right down the middle of the glass. It looked just a little warped. Each piece of his face was pale, paler than usual, paper white and stark.

His skin still looked intact. Patrick reached up and scratched his cheek, digging his fingernails into it and feeling them scrape down. It felt better to see color. 

He felt colorless, like it had been sapped from him, sucked out of his body via drinking straw. Only one part of him had the capability to bleed and it ached like a fucking bitch. Patrick wished he’d go numb again so he’d stop feeling the pain flare up the length of his spine, his teeth grinding together. 

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He shut his eyes and felt the tremor in his elbows when he pressed his hands harder into the sides of the sink. 

_ one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen  _

_ breathe _

_ choke _

_ fuck _

_ breathe  _

_ one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen  _

Patrick shakily wiped his hand against his jeans and withdrew his phone from his pocket. 

_ did u get a ride? _

Patrick looked at Pete’s text for a moment, then another, then slid down to sit on the floor. He was tired of standing. It didn’t matter that it was on the filthy floor of a dirty club in L.A. He wouldn’t have cared where it was. 

_ No  _

_ Are you still here _

A trio of grey dots popped up almost immediately. 

_ im about to leave. where r u? why r u still here?  _

Patrick typed, backspaced, and retyped a variation on the same few texts more than a few times. 

_ Ran into someone outside and got caught up. Forgot to call a cab _

_ We’re going to the same place anyway so I thought I’d wait for you  _

Patrick would have to invent someone that Pete didn’t know. That was something he could focus on. Take his mind off things. Or he could pluck someone out of thin air, introduce a character that Pete would’ve never gotten the chance to meet. So many possibilities. 

_ <3  _

_ ill meet u outside _

Patrick’s heart skipped a beat and hopped into his throat. 

_ I’m in the bathroom actually  _

_ I got cold and came back in  _

Cold? Cold? It was almost seventy fucking degrees. 

_ how drunk r u? _

Acting drunk was a great idea, but Patrick couldn’t sell it right now. Not convincingly enough. 

_ Pretty not drunk  _

_ Just wait for me _

Pete sent him a final  _ ‘k’. _ Patrick let his eyes fall shut as he clicked the power button on his phone, another shuddering wave making his blood—or lack thereof—freeze. 

_ one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen  _

* * *

  
The instantaneous spark of familiarity and affection in Pete’s eyes was just the same as it always had been for the past twelve years, but Patrick felt less than deserving of it in that moment. 

“Who was your guy?” Pete asked, brows knitting together as Patrick approached the curb. He quirked in concern immediately, working to understand what was wrong before Patrick even said anything. Patrick could see it in the way Pete went a little tenser, the way the corner of his mouth fell, the way his face softened. All almost completely imperceptible unless you were intrinsically tied with each bit of minutia, ready to mimic them and communicate back without opening your mouth. 

It was a fucking curse. 

“My, uh.” Patrick blinked and shook his head a little, pushing his hands into his jacket pockets. He shoved them right up against the seams, applying enough pressure and focusing on it to keep him from shivering. “My old tour manager’s wife. Nikki.” Not her name. It had been Nancy or Nora or something. Something older-lady-ish, despite her being younger than him. He didn’t know why he’d picked Nikki. Maybe he was thinking of someone else. “She just wanted to, uh, check in, I guess. See what I’m actually doing right now. It’s not really like I’ve been keeping in touch.” 

“Yeah, totally.” Pete was trying to pick little pieces of Patrick apart, lifting things up and peeking into dark corners with his gaze, trying to find what was mismatched. Patrick pulled his phone from his pocket instead, making an effort to look like he had a new distraction as a blush found its way underneath his skin. “Did you, like, get in a fight with her, or...? Did she hit you or something?”

Patrick shook his head at his phone. “Nah, just—it just made me think, I guess. About what else could’ve been or whatever, you know. All wistful bullshit.” 

“Wistful, huh?” The barely-masked bitterness in Pete’s voice made Patrick’s mouth tighten. As if that was another thing he needed: an excuse for Pete to get pissy over yet another hypothetical scenario in a mile-long list of hypothetical scenarios that Pete had been obsessing over for a year.

“Not, like, wistful, just—I don’t know.” Patrick scrolled through opened-and-never-addressed texts, rereading messages without taking in a single word. “All she did was ask about what I’ve been doing.”

“That’s pretty goddamn broad, dude.”

Patrick couldn’t figure out a good answer to that. Not right away. “That’s why I was out for so long,” he muttered. “I’m really tired, alright? I’m tired and I’ve got a crazy migraine.” 

“Yeah.” Pete’s voice was short and clipped. Patrick closed his eyes for a second and swallowed down the way it made him feel. “Cool. Fine. I’ll call a cab.”

_ You do that, _ Patrick thought, feeling his vision go blurry behind his glasses. 

* * *

They were renting an apartment together for three months to work together before Pete went to produce a few new projects through Left Method. It was a studio on La Costa Beach, too crowded, depressing, and underwhelming for the cost (as to be expected), but at least the view was nice. From Patrick’s bedroom, he could see at least one square inch of the beach that wasn’t obscured by other buildings and/or hypodermic needles and used condoms littering the sand. To his credit, Pete had so graciously allowed him to take the room with the wider windows when they first moved in. Patrick had figured it would’ve meant little; he absolutely had assumed Pete would’ve sneaked in night after night while giving some poor excuse of a night terror or a horrifying vision of the future or something like that. But, again, to his credit, it hadn’t happened. Not since they’d started living together again. 

Patrick kept telling himself it was a good thing. He could get a full night’s rest. He didn’t have to worry about Pete kicking him and bruising his arm and shoving him off the bed by accident. He wouldn’t have to listen to stressed, fitful, pill-addled babbling in Pete’s sleep. He wouldn’t wake up covered in sweat from Pete’s inevitable koala hold, practically suffocating him, arms wrapped around him so tightly that skin was on the verge of fusing. This was all, objectively, good. The space was good.

Sometimes, though, it got too cold at night for Patrick to sleep comfortably.

Patrick couldn’t stand how cold his side would get lately. There was a lack of Pete, and a lack of Pete meant a lack of warmth. The winter just after Fall Out Boy had become less of an after-school project and had instead become a genuine band and a way of life, Patrick could still vividly recall burying himself in the crook of Pete’s arm while Chicago had pelted them unforgivingly with snow under the stark, white light of a gas station roof some time after midnight. They were waiting for Andy to get off the phone and for Joe to stop getting lost in the aisles in the convenience store after getting stoned out of his mind. Pete was running on two hours of sleep, Patrick on three, and he remembered how hot Pete was running at the time. Even in just a hoodie thrown haphazardly over a shirt, he was like Patrick’s own personal heater. 

“Thought you said you were gonna plot some, like, cryptic, underhanded way to leave me for dead after I stole your juice money earlier,” Pete had said, voice muffled when he’d pressed his mouth against the top of Patrick’s knit cap. His fingers had splayed over Patrick’s waist, sinking in and refusing to let go. 

“I’m still working on it,” Patrick had mumbled. “Give me another day. Maybe you can redeem yourself.”

“You want me to buy you more juice?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

But that was in 2001. In 2014, Patrick couldn’t imagine getting that close again. At least not that easily.

He knew it was all his fault, too. Recreating Fall Out Boy had meant dismantling and restructuring the band dynamics and, thus, it had included telling Pete to maintain a safe distance. For his own sake, Patrick had stressed. It was just to save Pete from hurting his own feelings again and again. And that space was also supposed to be good. If both of them were allowed a degree of separation, they wouldn’t be so tightly entangled again, keeping each other from breathing or feeling anything outside of one another. It was sensible. Both of them had grown up and grown into themselves and they were supposed to act like it. 

But Pete being scared of his own shadow now still made Patrick feel hollow and frozen. Because he’d shut Pete up in a proverbial pen and left him there, Patrick was alone and he was cold, especially now. 

Patrick’s skin was still bleeding and he desperately needed Pete to lick his wounds. 

At least Pete had the maturity not to start in on exactly what he thought was wrong while they were in the cab. He resolutely scrolled through his phone, not reaching for Patrick’s hand or arm or shoving at him just for the sake of abusing his attention. He was stoic. He wasn’t going to embarrass either of them. 

And he refused to come any closer. Patrick wished he could just reach out and do  _ something _ , but it didn’t feel right. Nothing did, of course, but that felt like the worst of it. Somehow, he assumed that Pete would be able to feel exactly what had been done to him. 

It still hurt and it was getting worse. It was a harsh twinge that pulled at him like thread getting pulled fast and tight, a running stitch running him ragged. Every movement was another reminder that he had been physically and mentally cut at the seams, his insides at risk of falling out, spilling everywhere. He would have to hurry to put them back as he tried not to cry out of embarrassment. 

He just wanted to be held like a child. Like he was five years old. Patrick shifted and scraped the heel of his shoe over the floor of the cab, blinking rapidly at the blur of neon color outside the window. 

“Hey.”

Patrick took a second to look over, startled out of his self-pitying stupor. “What?”

Pete frowned, searching each individual line of Patick’s face as if he could pull something new out of it. Patrick blinked again, which was a really stupid idea, because he suddenly had to look down and pick at his cuticles like it was his job.

“Are you okay?” Pete asked in an undertone, so full of fearful condolence that Patrick felt that much more ashamed. 

Patrick nodded at his cuticles and looked back out the window. “Yeah,” he said, completely unlike himself, like he was stuffed with sawdust. “It’s fine. I’m—it’s fine.”

It wasn’t even slightly convincing, but it did easily convey that they’d talk about this later. Hopefully much later.

Hopefully never. Ever. Patrick felt a sharp sting as he pulled too much skin away from the side of his thumb. 

* * *

“So Nikki doesn’t exist, right?” 

Patrick didn’t look up from his phone, staring into his lap and blinking at controlled intervals. He wished the couch would embrace him and let him sink seamlessly into the cushions. 

“I mean, she does, that’s just…” He scrolled through Twitter notifications that he didn’t read. “...that’s not her name. It’s, uh, Nancy or Nora or something.”

“But, like, she wasn’t there,” Pete said shortly, leaning against the wall next to the front door. “I don’t care if she’s a hypothetical person or not, ‘cause it doesn’t actually matter. She wasn’t there.”

“No, she wasn’t,” Patrick muttered. 

“What happened?” Pete’s voice softened and Patrick felt the tiniest sense of relief. He couldn’t take being scolded right now. “You know I won’t tell anyone, dude, come on; I just need you to be okay. Did you get hurt? You want me to drive you to the hospital?” 

Patrick shook his head and felt a well in the base of his throat, building and building until he dared breathe again. It shuddered low and deep as he shut his phone off, digging the heel of his hand into his eye behind his glasses. Horrifyingly, he felt his shoulders jolt and he made the most pathetic sound, escaping his mouth in a whine. Shame flooded through him like he’d suddenly developed a fever. 

“Hey, hey, what’s going on?” Pete rushed over, kneeling in front of him, sliding his fingers in between Patrick’s and clutching them. It was so instantaneous and so familiar and so kind that it broke Patrick further and he felt his eyes burn. “Patrick, look at me.” 

The thing was, Patrick couldn’t, because looking at Pete’s big, sparkling, pleading puppy eyes was just going to make him feel worse. He shook his head minutely and shoved the heel of his hand further into his eye until he could see little bursts of white sparks behind it. “I j-just—” 

Trying to talk at all was what did him in. Patrick hiccuped and let out a small cry, gritting his teeth against it until it hurt. 

He couldn’t exactly remember the last time he’d cried like this in front of Pete. He thought it had to have been sooner than what he recalled, but, well, maybe it wasn’t, considering how little contact they’d had with each other for almost three years. Patrick remembered a physical fight just after an interview in 2009 where one of them had said something really idiotic that had set the other off . It was an extremely shallow breaking point, but a breaking point nonetheless. Sweating and aching and gasping, his soul begging for relief, he’d leaned into Pete’s licorice-thin frame and choked out nonsense apologies, tired of things being the other way around as blood clotted at the corner of his mouth. They had both been too exhausted to stay friends for much longer, lest they genuinely snap and really, truly try to kill each other. 

Patrick had had a reason to feel guilty then. He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that he really didn’t have any reason to feel guilty now, because it was just unreasonable and self-pitying, but he couldn’t shake it. 

“Patrick, man, come on, I need you to tell me what’s wrong. Please. It’s me.” Patrick felt Pete’s hand hook around the back of his neck, a thumb gently tilting his chin up. The tone Pete used wasn’t all that certain, as if he didn’t know whether or not he had the authority to say  _ “It’s me” _ as a reason for Patrick to trust him. Patrick wanted to grab him and shake him and beg him to be twice as clingy, twice as needy, and twice as emotional as he used to be, just to have a semblance of their past intimacy back again. He needed it. He  _ craved  _ it. He needed it like he needed a blanket over his shoulders, that heaviness and coziness and lingering heat. 

“It was just—” Patrick shook his head again, sniffing and coughing before he could finish his sentence. “—I was—I got, like, I don’t know. Attacked, I guess.”

“Attacked how?” Patrick could see Pete getting preemptively angry, voice shaking ever so slightly if you listened hard enough. “When?”

“I kind of, like, I fucked up, I guess. I just went, um, I followed this…” Patrick made a sincere effort to string a solid sentence together, but sheer embarrassment kept tripping him up. “...I don’t know what I was thinking. It was so goddamn stupid. I just wanted to, um, to screw around with someone, I guess. I felt weird and, like, out of it just being there and I couldn’t find you. So I left for just a few minutes.”

Pete’s brow furrowed. “You left  _ with _ someone, right? That’s what you’re saying?”

“Yeah. It was really fucking impulsive and shitty. I don’t know why I did it. But, like, yeah, I don’t know, he—I—I changed my mind at the last second and—” Patrick had to clear his throat and swallow again, hard enough to try and rid himself of a little bit of toxicity. “—he didn’t, you know?”

“Oh.” Pete’s face changed indescribably. Patrick couldn’t even place it. “Jesus Christ,” he whispered. “Patrick, that’s—holy shit, I’m sorry.” 

Patrick just managed a shrug, because what else was he even supposed to say?  _ “I’m sorry, too” _ ? _ “I’m sorry that some stupid fucking druggie fucked me in a disgusting alleyway outside of a club I never should’ve been at” _ ? Something like that. 

“Did you see what he looked like?” Pete asked softly. “Did you get a name or anything?” 

“I don’t know. It was dark. So, like, not really. And he never told me his name.” 

Pete straightened up and pulled Patrick into his arms instead, hugging him tight with no intention of letting go. Patrick’s eyes fell shut, glittering with tears as he turned his head into the crook of Pete’s neck. His fingers clutched at the back of Pete’s shirt, clinging fast, sticking to him. 

The only sound in the room was Patrick’s quiet crying fit, whimpering and staining Pete’s shirt as he sobbed jagged sobs, his glasses off-kilter. He could barely feel the fingers that Pete stroked through his hair, but he did think it helped. Maybe just a little. 

* * *

Pete had insisted that Patrick go to bed and then talk to the police. Patrick had insisted even more emphatically that he didn’t want to go to bed, he wanted to drink. He needed something to drown himself and the past few hours out so that when he looked in the mirror again, he wouldn’t look quite as pale or paper-thin. 

So Pete had obliged, making screwdrivers for them both because orange juice was the only mixer they had in the entire apartment. Patrick was almost five screwdrivers deep as well as deep into some kind of mania, perfectly balancing between extreme joy and extreme agony. 

He remembered Pete explaining mania to him years and years ago at a college party when Patrick was freshly seventeen and drunk for the second-ever time in his life, laying on a twin-sized mattress at Pete’s side in somebody’s basement. Mania was a blend of ecstasy and utter fucking lethargic shittiness of the soul, condensed into one pocket of your brain that propelled you forward with no rhyme or reason. You could write a book in a night and have a breakdown if someone pulled you away from it to tell you to get the sleep you desperately needed but couldn’t force yourself to undertake. Food didn’t have a taste and you wouldn’t notice if you were thirsty or not. Everything you did dripped pure dread, because once the mania ended, a state of depression ensued and made you feel impossibly thick and dark and empty and formless. It was something Patrick had only ever felt a facsimile of, because he’d internalized at some point that whatever he was going through, Pete was going through something worse.

For once, he’d managed to beat Pete at suffering from forces beyond his control.  _ Ha _ .

“You know, I never,  _ ever  _ thought I was gonna feel worse than you. Not ever,” Patrick said, tipping his head back against the armrest of the couch. His socked feet were crossed in Pete’s lap, one arm dangling off the couch cushions, fingers brushing the carpet. “I think we swapped places. Brains. Something.”

“Like Face/Off,” Pete suggested. “I mean, that’s not what happened, but it’s really not any different than swapping brains, actually. You’ll get the same effect and same reality exchange.”

“Yeah, y’know, you watch that movie and you think, like, wow, I’m super close to getting my face pulled off at any given time.” Patrick giggled dazedly. “It’s just an hour-long surgery and all they do is suction it off and put it on another guy. Then there’s all that nineties dialogue about microchips and whatever. It’s crazy.”

“We should do that. Once they make the technology possible. We’ll do it for a music video.” 

“Pete, we can’t, everyone would know.” Patrick rubbed his eyes. The skin just underneath them felt soft and raw. “First of all, there’s the tonal difference, like, obviously, and the tattoos, the height difference—”

“It’s two inches, dude.” 

“It’s a significant two inches!” 

“Not significant enough.” Pete stroked his thumb over Patrick’s ankle, looking at him with an expression that Patrick could only think to refer to as ‘cotton candy’: way too sweet and likely to dissolve if it came in contact with the wrong elements. 

“God, don’t do that,” Patrick groaned, kicking Pete’s hand away from his foot. “Don’t. I don’t want you to look at me like that. Not now.”

“Sorry,” Pete mumbled, folding his thumb into his fist and clenching it, looking down at Patrick’s legs. “I just forgot.” 

“Oh, no, don’t…” Patrick suddenly felt miserable and exasperated, slipping back into the state he’d been in earlier, his brief distraction cut off. “Jesus, this is all my fault.” He rolled over and felt another sharp sting that made him regret moving at all. He made a noise of frustration, angry and guttural as he teared up again. “Goddamnit,” he managed. 

“Christ, no, it’s not, none of it’s your fault. Come on.” Pete grabbed Patrick and pulled him upright, dragging him closer. Patrick fell like a ragdoll, falling loosely into Pete and going limp. “I don’t want you to blame yourself for any of it, okay? None of it’s your fault.” Pete’s breath was warm and steady on the back of Patrick’s neck, an arm curling protectively around his waist. 

All it did was make his memory come back. Patrick’s breath began to come faster and faster, fingers grabbing at Pete’s arm as if it was going to do anything. He didn’t pull or press down. He was too loose and hot to make any kind of attempt at it, his bones slackened.

“I’m so fucking pathetic,” Patrick gasped, his chest seizing. “I d-don’t—I don’t even—I don’t know what I  _ wanted  _ from him. I don’t. I really don’t.”   
Pete rubbed soft circles over Patrick’s lower back, pressing his mouth against the top of Patrick’s head. “...what, um. What did you want, you know, at first?” he asked quietly. 

“Just something different.” Patrick’s throat hurt. It felt like someone had been trying to dig out his larynx with a rusty spoon. “I don’t know. Something anonymous. Help figure myself out. I can’t, like, I can’t even describe it and I don’t want to.” 

“Yeah. That’s fine.” Pete’s strokes grew longer and more languid, trailing from the base of Patrick’s spine to the nape of his neck. Even so, Patrick still couldn’t force himself to calm down, twitching and shivering. “I—could I ask you something?”

Patrick made a low noise that was supposed to be “yes”, but it didn’t come out quite right. 

“How’d it feel?”

Patrick didn’t have enough working cells in his brain right now to process a normal, more conversational sentence, let alone something like that. 

“What?” he asked, his voice cracking, higher on the last few letters.

“How did it feel?” Pete asked almost under his breath, semi-hidden in the chunks of mousy brown under his mouth. 

“I… I don’t know. It was fucking awful. It was—it hurt. A lot. Why are you asking me that?” 

“Just curious. That’s all. Thought you might wanna talk about it.” Pete pressed his lips against Patrick’s temple, drawing a lazy pattern over his shoulder blade. They hadn’t been this physically close since… well, Patrick couldn’t remember, actually. His memory bank was fuzzy at the moment. 

He couldn’t force the present into something concrete. He couldn’t tie anything down. The only thing that felt solid was Pete.

Like always.

“It was…” Patrick coughed and nuzzled into Pete’s shirt. “It wasn’t, like, sexual or anything. It didn’t feel sexual. It was just violent, I guess. I was bleeding. It hurt s-so, so much, like, worse than anything I’ve ever felt before. It was like he pulled something out of me. And he just left me there. I couldn’t stand up.” 

Pete’s breath hitched as he pressed another kiss to Patrick’s head. Which, actually, hey, that was something Patrick should’ve noticed earlier. “Did he kiss you?”

“I don’t know. Sure. Maybe. I don’t remember.” 

Pete pulled back just enough that Patrick looked up in disoriented unhappiness, needing the solace of conversation without eye contact until Pete firmly but clumsily pressed his mouth against Patrick’s. 

All it did was disorient him further. Patrick’s eyelids fluttered, his heart pounding as his fingers scrambled back against the couch. He grasped at a cushion and quickly pulled free, his other hand gripping the front of Pete’s shirt. 

“Stop it.” Patrick stared at Pete, feeling his lip tremble. “What the hell are you doing? How many times—”

“I know, I know, I get it, I know, but just, like, let me try this. Just once, okay?” Pete’s face was flushed, high and scarlet red, his pupils blown wide and black. “I know it’s been just, like, it’s been wrong the other times I’ve tried it, and I get that, and I know it’s wrong now, but I want you to trust me and let me do this. Just so you know how it’s supposed to feel.”

Patrick’s lips parted in an attempt to say something, but nothing came out. Pete seized his silence and kissed him again, fingers tight around Patrick’s wrist. 

He still didn’t need or want it. Patrick could still try to dredge up the past, thinking of bits and pieces here and there, but nothing that really fit together. Pete grabbing the sides of his face and kissing him hard and fast after he’d forced him to sing at their first-ever practice. An excuse for generating more heat after the van had crashed. A plea for attention and affection during a massive breakdown in 2004. Rejection after rejection for years, piling up like letters meant to snuff out hope, but it had never fucking sunk in. 

Patrick suddenly thought that, despite holding Pete at arm’s length, he’d never learned his lesson. He was just scared of getting punished. He was a dumb puppy. But, arguably, Patrick was dumber. 

He felt drunk and tired and fragile and hurt. He should’ve just gone to bed. Pete felt wet and hot in his mouth, fingers twisted in his clothes, leaving him unable to break away. Pete made a needy little sound against him, something like a moan, and something sick and green twisted Patrick’s insides together. 

“Pete— _ ngh _ —” Patrick tipped his head to the side and exhaled sharply as Pete pressed an open-mouthed kiss to his jawline. Patrick’s fingers curled in, his nails catching on the ink sunk into Pete’s arm. He thought he was going to start hyperventilating. Was he going to have a panic attack? He’d never had a panic attack while drunk before. 

“It should’ve been me. Not like that,  _ nothing  _ like that, I could fucking kill that guy, but your first time with, you know, a guy, that should’ve been me. Fuck him.” Pete’s voice was dark and rough, full of teeth, more unstable than Patrick had heard from him since the band had broken up. “Should’ve been me.” He edged Patrick backwards, grip tightening around him. 

Patrick didn’t breathe when his back hit the couch. He found his legs tangled between Pete’s, every piece of him suffocating underneath the weight settled on top of him.

_ one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen _

Pete bit him before he could count any higher. Pete sank his teeth into the side of Patrick’s neck and made him gasp in mingled shock and pain before licking over the wound like the puppy he was. Patrick’s spine seemed to throb and the feeling of it came up and out of his throat, a low groan that just seemed to spur Pete on. 

“You could’ve asked me. You always just had to ask me.” Pete kissed the column of Patrick’s throat, clutching his hip, hitching his leg up. Patrick tried to start counting again, needing something,  _ anything  _ to distract himself with and ease his anxiety, but Pete kept throwing a wrench in it because he wouldn’t stop fucking  _ talking _ . “I couldn’t fucking hurt you like that.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Patrick finally managed, pushing himself up and snatching the front of Pete’s shirt, kissing him first this time. If he couldn’t get out of this for a second time, he was at least going to have some level of control.

That was how it always was with Pete, Patrick realized. Pete would always give him the illusion of having the upper hand, just to humor him or settle an argument or appease Patrick’s control-freakiness, but it was still up to Pete whether or not things went as far as they did. And that was because Patrick had assumed for years that he would eventually have to bend to Pete’s will one way or another. He’d offered him nothing but mercy. Pete refusing to touch him was less about him bowing his head and doing as he was told and so much more about Patrick seeing him in a continued negative light, keeping them apart for even longer than the hiatus already had. 

Kissing Pete first and pulling on his hair until he could feel the strain of it against Pete’s scalp wasn’t any real kind of control at all, but Patrick could pretend it was, like he was a teenager and he was just experimenting and that this was only slightly less pathetic than it actually was. Anything less than passive was just going to make him remember everything he’d gone through that night. 

The hand on the back of his neck. 

The knee that shoved apart his legs. 

The brick that dug into his cheek and left a burn behind. 

The breath heaving against his ear that shook and hitched every few seconds. 

Oh, God, he was going to fall apart again. 

Patrick wrapped his arms around Pete, holding him as though he were about to sink right through the floor and drown. “Do whatever you want,” he said, his voice thick and wet as he reached down for Pete’s zipper, fingers fumbling. “Just—take care of me. The only way that you can,” he added in a whisper. “I know you know how.”

* * *

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_ one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen _

_ one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen _

* * *

Patrick saw Pete’s hand come away slick with slime after he pulled it away from in between Patrick’s legs, an unmixed, blotchy concoction of red and pink and cream and white that dripped off his fingers.

Patrick’s vision went dim. 

* * *

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* * *

The sunlight pierced straight through to the back of Patrick’s skull after he first opened his eyes. He moaned, shutting them again and rolling over to face away from the window. 

He bumped into something solid and burning hot. He forced himself to open his eyes again to see what it was. 

Pete was curled up next to him, sleeping at his side for the first time in years. 

Patrick exhaled and rubbed his face, grateful that, at the very least, Pete hadn’t rolled on top of him or kicked him off the bed in the middle of the night. And, of course, at the slightest movement or sound, Pete stirred, mumbling almost imperceptibly. 

Patrick half-smiled at him. “Hey.”

Pete blinked woozily, his hair an untamed mess, sticking up in strange places and matted in others. The damage wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been in years past, though, especially when he’d let it get as long as it had in, what, 2008? ‘09? Something like that. 

“Hey.” Pete smiled back, looking dopey and too angelic for his own good. “‘Morning.”

Patrick rolled his eyes and pushed himself up, wincing hard the second he did so, his head throbbing instantly. “Oh, God. Jesus. Did I black out last night?” He pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. “Feels like I did. I don’t… I can’t remember anything.” He looked down at Pete, frowning thoughtfully. “Didn’t we go out somewhere?”

“Oh. Uh, yeah. Yeah, we did.” Pete turned over to search for something on the nightstand (his phone, probably). “We went to this shitty club on the other side of L.A. You hated it, so I kept buying you drinks until you learned to like it. You kind of, like, you threw up all over yourself a little. You saved it till we got home, though. I just cleaned you up and we watched _Hellraiser_ ‘cause it was on.”

“Oh, that’s—yeah. Great. Thanks.” Now that he thought about it, _Hellraiser_ did sound familiar. Patrick laid back down and buried his face in the pillow. “You’ve done enough, I’m sure, but since I was clearly so gracious as to let you spend the night, would you call it even if I asked you to go get me breakfast?”

“Maybe.” Patrick felt the mattress decompress as Pete slid out of bed. He felt a wet kiss on his cheek and he whined, slapping weakly at the air above him. “Coffee? From that Turkish place?”

“You know what I want,” Patrick mumbled, pulling the sheets over his head. 

“Yeah, I know. I know how to take care of you, right?” 

There was the strangest little note of hesitation in Pete’s voice. Patrick chalked it up to himself normally being completely impossible to deal with whenever he had a hangover. 

“Yeah, Pete," Patrick said, muffled by layers and layers of cotton. "You always do.”


End file.
